A little background: thanks to layoffs and the almost constant exodus of staff who won't put up longer with Stonecold's policies, we are down by more than half the staff we used to have to run one big main library and several satellites. Most days, some of us are on desk alone for an hour or there will be two of us for longer periods of time. For most of the time we are on desk, we cannot do any kind of paper work or online work because we are constantly getting up to help with questions of the "How do I upload my photos from my IPhone to Facebook?" variety and the every popular "I made an email address for myself six years ago, but I can't remember what it was. Can you find it for me?" (Nope). We are running to get books for people, trying to help people make sense of bills or subpoenas (yes, we have been asked to explain those, I bet Peter M. has similar tales) and so on and so forth. So we really cannot sit down and not move for two or three hours at a time to, you know, keep someone honest if they are, say, taking a test.

Enter special snowflake who can't seem to get that WE CAN'T DO THIS.

He called this morning asking us to proctor an exam. I have done this before, waaaaaaay back when we had actual staff and time. It involved me getting several exams mailed to me, me signing several forms and then locking the person in a glassed in room where I could keep an eye on him AND get some work done. I also had to time him.

My coworker got the original call and the above has always been her proctoring experience, too. She explained for twenty minutes why we don't do this, including the all important "monitoring" part of the proctoring.

Well, the patron decided to do some research and came in to tell us that other area libraries said THEY would proctor the test, but they wouldn't monitor him, he was on his own as to the time and they would not sign anything that said they had watched him, but he was certainly welcome to come in and take his test on the honor system.

He shows up with this information and says "You should consider this. I need some help here!" One of my immediate supervisors pointed out that "What Other Library does isn't called proctoring, it's called you coming in and doing it all on your own. We can't be responsible for tellling your professor that you followed all the rules when we can't be available to monitor you."

He continued to argue that the other libraries are willing to proctor him and we should do the same. We told him again that the other libraries are telling him he can come in and take the exam if he wants, but they aren't going to give h im any assistance or support. We told him the same "You are welcome to come in here and take the exam, but we are not going to be able to monitor you and since we cannot monitor you we cannot sign the necessary forms saying you followed the rules."

Nothing was resolved when he left except that he had agreed to talk to his professor and see what "proctoring" meant to the professor.

It's a holiday and the banks are closed. SS manages to phone the Corporate Security office of a very large bank with over 600 branches. Security has nothing to do with customers.

1. SS is furious because the security person on duty doesn't immediately recognize his name, since SS is one of the most important customers of the bank.2. SS demands that Security send someone to the SS's bank branch and open it up so the SS can make a deposit that absolutely must be made that day. Will not take "no" for an answer. "I am a very important customer of this bank! Is this how you treat all your VIPs?"

I saw this! Wow. truly a special snowflake

I"m wondering how overdrawn he was to throw a fit like that. I figure he wrote a check, the deposit to cover it didn't make it in on time that is why he tried the strong arm tactic.

A little background: thanks to layoffs and the almost constant exodus of staff who won't put up longer with Stonecold's policies, we are down by more than half the staff we used to have to run one big main library and several satellites. Most days, some of us are on desk alone for an hour or there will be two of us for longer periods of time. For most of the time we are on desk, we cannot do any kind of paper work or online work because we are constantly getting up to help with questions of the "How do I upload my photos from my IPhone to Facebook?" variety and the every popular "I made an email address for myself six years ago, but I can't remember what it was. Can you find it for me?" (Nope). We are running to get books for people, trying to help people make sense of bills or subpoenas (yes, we have been asked to explain those, I bet Peter M. has similar tales) and so on and so forth. So we really cannot sit down and not move for two or three hours at a time to, you know, keep someone honest if they are, say, taking a test.

Enter special snowflake who can't seem to get that WE CAN'T DO THIS.

He called this morning asking us to proctor an exam. I have done this before, waaaaaaay back when we had actual staff and time. It involved me getting several exams mailed to me, me signing several forms and then locking the person in a glassed in room where I could keep an eye on him AND get some work done. I also had to time him.

My coworker got the original call and the above has always been her proctoring experience, too. She explained for twenty minutes why we don't do this, including the all important "monitoring" part of the proctoring.

Well, the patron decided to do some research and came in to tell us that other area libraries said THEY would proctor the test, but they wouldn't monitor him, he was on his own as to the time and they would not sign anything that said they had watched him, but he was certainly welcome to come in and take his test on the honor system.

He shows up with this information and says "You should consider this. I need some help here!" One of my immediate supervisors pointed out that "What Other Library does isn't called proctoring, it's called you coming in and doing it all on your own. We can't be responsible for tellling your professor that you followed all the rules when we can't be available to monitor you."

He continued to argue that the other libraries are willing to proctor him and we should do the same. We told him again that the other libraries are telling him he can come in and take the exam if he wants, but they aren't going to give h im any assistance or support. We told him the same "You are welcome to come in here and take the exam, but we are not going to be able to monitor you and since we cannot monitor you we cannot sign the necessary forms saying you followed the rules."

Nothing was resolved when he left except that he had agreed to talk to his professor and see what "proctoring" meant to the professor.

What a super SS! Apparently he's too important to proctor the thing himself.

A little background: thanks to layoffs and the almost constant exodus of staff who won't put up longer with Stonecold's policies, we are down by more than half the staff we used to have to run one big main library and several satellites. Most days, some of us are on desk alone for an hour or there will be two of us for longer periods of time. For most of the time we are on desk, we cannot do any kind of paper work or online work because we are constantly getting up to help with questions of the "How do I upload my photos from my IPhone to Facebook?" variety and the every popular "I made an email address for myself six years ago, but I can't remember what it was. Can you find it for me?" (Nope). We are running to get books for people, trying to help people make sense of bills or subpoenas (yes, we have been asked to explain those, I bet Peter M. has similar tales) and so on and so forth. So we really cannot sit down and not move for two or three hours at a time to, you know, keep someone honest if they are, say, taking a test.

Enter special snowflake who can't seem to get that WE CAN'T DO THIS.

He called this morning asking us to proctor an exam. I have done this before, waaaaaaay back when we had actual staff and time. It involved me getting several exams mailed to me, me signing several forms and then locking the person in a glassed in room where I could keep an eye on him AND get some work done. I also had to time him.

My coworker got the original call and the above has always been her proctoring experience, too. She explained for twenty minutes why we don't do this, including the all important "monitoring" part of the proctoring.

Well, the patron decided to do some research and came in to tell us that other area libraries said THEY would proctor the test, but they wouldn't monitor him, he was on his own as to the time and they would not sign anything that said they had watched him, but he was certainly welcome to come in and take his test on the honor system.

He shows up with this information and says "You should consider this. I need some help here!" One of my immediate supervisors pointed out that "What Other Library does isn't called proctoring, it's called you coming in and doing it all on your own. We can't be responsible for tellling your professor that you followed all the rules when we can't be available to monitor you."

He continued to argue that the other libraries are willing to proctor him and we should do the same. We told him again that the other libraries are telling him he can come in and take the exam if he wants, but they aren't going to give h im any assistance or support. We told him the same "You are welcome to come in here and take the exam, but we are not going to be able to monitor you and since we cannot monitor you we cannot sign the necessary forms saying you followed the rules."

Nothing was resolved when he left except that he had agreed to talk to his professor and see what "proctoring" meant to the professor.

What a super SS! Apparently he's too important to proctor the thing himself.

I think the SS is the one who needs a proctor because he's taking an exam which requires one.

Logged

"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

She is also uninformed, and is probably the person causing the anxiety in the kids. According the experts quoted kids can't have a full on reaction to acorns unless they eat them.

I'm saying this as someone with a the most deadly peanut allergy - Nut bans are well intentioned but wrong headed. Kids with nut allergies are going to have learn to live in a peanut/tree nut filled world. They need to start learning young and in a safe place with adults watching to help protect them.

School kitchens should be peanut/nut free (I didn't buy hot lunch all the way through elementary because you had to have a cookie on you tray. They were peanut or chocolate chip served by the same person alternating one then the other)

Individual classrooms should be peanut/nut free

Students who are allergic should be able to move away from someone eating something with peanuts/nuts

Classmates should know to wash their hands after eating something with peanuts/nuts

Any attempt to threaten someone with peanuts/nuts or actually expose them to peanuts/nuts should be treated as a criminal act.

I worry that some kid with peanut allergy is going to switch jackets/hoodies with a friend, and have a reaction to the detergent used to wash the jacket/hoody and no-one is going to believe him/her when s/he tell them s/he has been exposed because the campus is "peanut/nut free". (I've had mild to serious reactions under similar conditions)

A friend of mine ("Sherri") works part-time with a campus ministry at a local university - she just finished grad school last year, but she's been a student mentor and the soundboard person for evening worship and the website IT person and a bunch of other little things which probably add up to a lot more hours than she's paid for. The pastor of the nearest [her denomination] church is the leader of the campus ministry group, then there's an associate pastor who helps out and Sherri who does the majority of the day-to-day work.

The associate pastor "Bob" got married this summer. Sherri also makes wedding cakes and is trying to start her own bakery, so Bob and his fiancee asked if she would make their wedding cake for them. He offered $500, with the understanding that the wedding reception would encompass X people (I don't remember the exact number, but I think it was around two hundred). Most bakers would charge three times that, but Sherri agreed and told Bob the remainder of what she otherwise would have charged would be her wedding present to them. $500 pretty much covered her materials, but that's a LOT of baking!

A month or two before the wedding, Bob came back to her. See, there were some extra people they had forgotten to invite, so the reception would be closer to 1.5X people. And since it would be so much bigger, they weren't having it at the local church, they were having it in his fiancee's hometown - three hours away! Oh, and his fiancee thought $500 was way too much to pay for a cake because hey, sheet cakes are like ten bucks each at Wal-Mart, so they wanted her to do sheet cakes instead of the fancy ones she had planned and they'd pay $250 instead.

Sherri explained that a) $500 was already assuming $1K worth of wedding present, b) she wasn't going to be driving an extra six hours to deliver these cakes to their new reception, c) she'd have to rent a van and get special equipment to transport sheet cakes instead of the specialized kind she does which are much easier to transport, and d) she was already going to be baking for a solid week to get cake for X people; 1.5X just wasn't going to happen.

As you can probably predict from a special snowflake like this, Bob threw a big fit because Sherri "canceled on him at the last minute" and they had to go get store-bought cakes for the reception instead. (Which they did buy in his fiancee's hometown, so at least nobody had to drive a van full of cake there!) Sherri mysteriously never got an invitation to the wedding or the reception.

This actually crosses over into professional darwinism, because the head minister had already noticed some disturbing tendencies in Bob - such as his propensity to take the church's expensive sound equipment home with him for his own personal use whenever it wasn't being used at church (that he knew about). Sherri did a surprise inventory this month and discovered that of the four Very Expensive Electrical Doohickeys they owned, two were missing (one eventually turned up in Bob's car) and two were broken. Sherri thinks Bob was borrowing them and just swapped them out when he broke them (which is apparently pretty easy to do if you don't know what you're doing). It's up to the church board what to do now, but I really doubt Bob will come out of this looking good.

She is the reason why I get cringes from people when they hear my kid has food allergies, as they wait for me to ask for the school to ban any dairy or egg products (which I'd never do, he's not airborne allergic and, as khebert stated, it doesn't help the child learn to live with the allergies around them. But just mention your kid has allergies, and people assume you are like her.

Logged

"The test of good manners is to be patient with bad ones" - Solomon ibn Gabirol

I saw this on Yahoo - they asked people to submit stories about how the recent political election divided their families. I don't want to link to the story because I don't want to even suggest that this is a red vs blue issue - this was just a very SS daughter. So, to summarize the story:Daughter (who is the one telling the story) finds out her parents have put up a very large sign on their yard supporting the other candidate. She makes a big deal of them not telling her during their regular phone conversations and when she finally confronts them, the mother is "ashamed" and tries to justify it because there is another large sign for daughter's candidate across the street. Daughter then informs mother that as long as the sign is up, she will not visit them (keep in mind that she never saw the sign because she hadn't visited in all that time, so it doesn't strike me that she regularly visits them). In the end, the sign went down because of Sandy.

11/14/12I have a better one then that

True story, there was a candidate running for an office in our town and one of the candidates neighbors had a sign on their lawn for the opponent and the candidate called the brother of the neighbor and the brother called his sister and told her to take the sign off of her lawn.

The sister told the brother that it was her house and she would support who she wanted to.

Quite a few of the neighbors had signs for the opponent on their lawns, HHHMMMMMM I wonder if that was telling the candidate what they thought of the candidate.

IC

So, SS Daughter takes her parents political views a little too personally and tries to deny them the right to show their support of their candidate because she doesn't like it.

I was just at WalMart and most of the lanes were closed down. There were only two open on the side I was on, both 20 Items or Less lanes. I headed toward a lane and a woman got in front of me and checked out with two items in less than a minute. While I was putting my items on the small table, I noticed a couple of things stacked up against the wall but I didn't think anything about them as they seemed to be off to the side. I put my things on the table and another woman came up behind me, glared at me, snatched the items away, and huffily snapped at the cashier, "Well is that other lane even open?" To her credit the cashier just said "Yes ma'am" and didn't mention it again after the woman stomped (you could hear her boots thudding) off. Sorry lady, you can't save a place in an express checkout line.

Slartibartfast, that just burns me! People just don't realize how much work and effort, on top of the supplies, go into something like that.

I just made a birthday cake for a young relative, to feed 50 people. It was part of my gift, and took me a lot of time throughout the week before. (Making gumpaste pieces, making homemade fondant, baking, decorating, etc.) The difference is, the birthday girl's parents were thrilled and very appreciative.

But even then, my mom commented when I told her how long it took (she asked) that "it didn't look like a complicated one." And mom's seen me work on cakes and generally has a pretty good grasp of the work that goes into them.

Then I told her that all of the teensy-tiny sugar pearls on the cake were attached by hand and royal icing. She backpedaled.

Logged

“She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.” ― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

I witnessed a bit of a special snowflake storm the other day. I just got back from a vacation that involved air travel. When I was getting picked up at the airport after arriving at my destination, I had to wait outside in the pick-up area for a few minutes.

This area has two lanes of traffic going the same direction, and two lanes where cars can stop to load passengers (one on the left side and one on the right side). Most people end up using the right side loading area, I think because there didn't used to be a left side loading area.

So while I was waiting, I saw an SUV that was clearly trying to get further up in the loading area -- she was waving at someone, so whoever she was picking up was probably already there. There was also a sedan that was stopped in the right side driving lane, possibly waiting for whoever she was picking up to arrive. She might have just had her attention lapse for a few minutes and not noticed that the cars in front of her had moved. I couldn't tell why she was stopped.

So the SUV inched forward while looking up ahead and waving, and then realized that the sedan in front of her isn't going anywhere. She tried to pull around the sedan, but didn't have enough room anymore because she'd inched too close to the sedan. So she rolled down her window and yells, quite rudely, "Can you move?" To which the woman in the sedan yelled, "If you say please" in a totally snotty tone of voice. Then the woman in the SUV started honking, the woman in the sedan still didn't move, and I didn't actually see the ending of that little interaction because my ride showed up. My husband said that the person directing traffic yelled at both of them, though.

there have been a van of signpainters up and down the street this week decorating the windows of the shops with holiday themed stencils as part of a community initiative from some local traders. Not at all snowflakey right?

Wrong.

The signpainter's van got a parking ticket for overstaying its welcome in a 1-hour parking space. When the owner of the van saw the inspector issuing the ticket she confronted him and demanded that he cancel the ticket because;

1. She was performing a 'service for the community' - for which she needs her van, but there is ample parking on the street and no reason why she cannot move the van as required.

2. She was working for the council - Not true. She was employed by a group of traders who have elected themselves as a committee in charge of beautification of the shopping strip and fostering community spirit. Had she been employed by the council she would have been issued with a temporary parking permit which would have exempted her from parking time limits.

The inspector refused to withdraw the ticket and advised her to contact the council. She withdrew extremely vexed.

The committee in question had sent out an email inviting local traders to 'opt in' to the decoration scheme, which we chose not to do. Unfortunately someone 'forgot' to advise the signpainters as they have decorated our front window, along with several others they were not meant to do (like the chain supermarket, which will be receiving instructions regarding holiday decorations from its corporate office any day now) and many others where there are some half applied decorations before the owner/tenant has obviously come out and asked them to cease and desist. Fortunately the decorations are merely paper applied with glue and will come off easily, but we have received no information about how and when these decorations will be removed after the holiday season is over, so if we have to employ a contractor to remove these signs and/or there is any damage to the windows when they are removed, we will be sending a bill to the committee.

So the 'beautification' part of their scheme is going along swimmingly. It's the 'fostering community spirit' bit where they are falling down.

The funniest part? Guess what Christmas themed decorations have been applied to the front of our building??

I saw this on Yahoo - they asked people to submit stories about how the recent political election divided their families. I don't want to link to the story because I don't want to even suggest that this is a red vs blue issue - this was just a very SS daughter. So, to summarize the story:Daughter (who is the one telling the story) finds out her parents have put up a very large sign on their yard supporting the other candidate. She makes a big deal of them not telling her during their regular phone conversations and when she finally confronts them, the mother is "ashamed" and tries to justify it because there is another large sign for daughter's candidate across the street. Daughter then informs mother that as long as the sign is up, she will not visit them (keep in mind that she never saw the sign because she hadn't visited in all that time, so it doesn't strike me that she regularly visits them). In the end, the sign went down because of Sandy.

11/14/12I have a better one then that

True story, there was a candidate running for an office in our town and one of the candidates neighbors had a sign on their lawn for the opponent and the candidate called the brother of the neighbor and the brother called his sister and told her to take the sign off of her lawn.

The sister told the brother that it was her house and she would support who she wanted to.

Quite a few of the neighbors had signs for the opponent on their lawns, HHHMMMMMM I wonder if that was telling the candidate what they thought of the candidate.

IC

So, SS Daughter takes her parents political views a little too personally and tries to deny them the right to show their support of their candidate because she doesn't like it.

This reminds me of a couple of years ago. Current housemate used to own a home in another state with her now ex-DH.

For years they'd displayed a sign in their front yard near election time for Candidate A of Blue Party. Then, over the course of time, policy changes, scandals, so on, they no longer supported Candidate A, and when he asked if they wanted a sign for the upcoming election, they declined.

Candidate B for Red Party was door-knocking in the area, and asked, after talking to them, if they would display his campaign sign, which they agreed to.

Candidate A, being a bit of a SS, got annoyed when he drove past their house and saw the opposing candidate's sign, so he reported them to the local council for displaying illegal signage on their property. The equivalent signage of which he'd been supplying them for many, many years. He also apparently reported everybody else that had a sign for Candidate B.

Housemate and exDH copped a big fine from the council... which they referred to Candidate B who paid it for them.